We’ve become dependent on E-Mail and it is probably for most of us the most important tool we use daily in our work. That is not a bad thing, Email was a great invention, one that has made our communications easier and our businesses more productive. But what about when your Email account stops working suddenly. This can be a frustrating time, but here are some things we can do before that happens:

Add a link to our Email providers status page to our favorites.

Create a contact with the support phone number and address for your Email provider.

Create a backup account for redundancy.

How to add a link to your providers status page

Providers don’t want to have to manually respond and tell their thousands of customers one at a time about trouble with their service. For that reason they provide status pages and even RSS feeds with updates on service issues. One of our hosting partners is Rackspace for example, they provide a status page that shows what is happening with all of their services:

Excerpt of Status Page at Rackspace

What you see in this example is the motivation for this article, Rackspace is experiencing connectivity issues with their Email accounts. To find the status page for your provider search the web for ” Email status page”. Here are some common providers status pages, not all providers give easy access:

Critical Support Contact Details

Find and save the contact details for support at your Email provider. There might be a time where you only have access to your phone and it might be impractical to access the status page depending on your situation. If you are driving down the road for example, it’s a whole lot easier to make a phone call using your hands free smart phone than pull over and research or read the status of an issue. This will also help you determine if it’s just you or if there are problems elsewhere out of your control. Most tech support departments deal with a wide variety of problems and can offer you with some basic troubleshooting tips if the issue is on your end.

Create a Backup Email Account for Redundancy

This is perhaps the most critical preparation step you can make, because if you ever face a pro-longed outage this could save you a lot of lost productivity. The steps are relatively simple.

Pick a back up provider (I use Gmail) and establish an account.

Setup your current Email to forward all messages to the newly established account (be sure to enable the option to “save a copy of all forwarded messages”).

In the event of an outage, you can then revert to the backup account and you should have the majority of the messages you received prior to that outage. In some cases the forwarding might be working even though you cannot check Email. This provides another opportunity to limit the effect a problem might have on you. This backup account can also be useful in other ways.

Extra uses of your Backup Email Account

Having a backup Email account can be very useful, here are some other tips to get more out of it.

Having delivery problems to a particular recipient? Use the backup account and see if it has something to do with your main address or domain.

Blind CC: everything you send from your main account to the backup account, you will then have another log (other than sent items) of all your messages sent.

Having problems receiving Emails? You can test sending to your primary account to see if there is a problem not being addressed by your vendors status page.

Use it when a site or service requires you to provide an Email address to get access to something. You can receive the confirmation on the backup account and keep your main account free from future messages from that entity.

Add your own tips, questions or feedback in the comment section below or via Email.

How would you like to suddenly start getting all the SPAM E-mails your quarantine used to catch delivered right to your inbox? That is what happens presently when you upgrade to an Exchange 2010 plan on Rackspace if you don’t utilize the Junk E-Mail Filtering option within Outlook.

The Problem

The problem is two-fold, for starters the Microsoft Outlook Junk filtering is highly un-reliable. Too many messages you want to receive will end up in the junk folder forcing you to have to go find them. Couple that with the changes with Rackspace Exchange 2010 that require you to enable the junk filter or all the messages hit your inbox and you see an obvious problem.

A Solution

After discussing this in depth with Rackspace and hoping they would come up with a better solution, it became evident that they have no plans to change anything for now. In the meantime the best work around is to utilize the flag that they use tip off Outlook that the message is spam is via a simple line they add to the header:

X-Spam-Flag: YES

Instead of enabling the Junk Filter and fighting with it, you can create a custom rule in Outlook to filter these messages to a folder of your determination. In my case I used the Junk E-Mail folder that is essentially disarmed right now (filtering is turned off). You may wish to consult with your favorite/company IT professional before doing this.

Adding the filter

Here is a simple step by step procedure for Outlook 2010 these instructions assume Junk E-Mail filtering is already turned off on Outlook (this article demonstrates how to disable Junk Filtering):

In the Home tab of Outlook click Rules | Create Rule.

Click “Advanced Options”

Scroll down and check the condition “with specific words in the message header”